Public Speaking

I’m often invited to give talks both directly and indirectly related to my creative work. In the past decade I found myself speaking in conferences, festivals, universities, museums, art galleries, offices, hacker spaces… you name it. I am always happy to consider new speaking gigs and workshops so if you’re interested, let me know (mushon(Replace this parenthesis with the @ sign)shual.com).

I gathered a few video documentations and descriptions from different talks I’ve been giving over the last couple of years:

If Everything is a Network, Nothing is a Network

Trapped in an imaginary web of NODES and EDGES we have come to visualize much of our lives and relationships in terms of the simplistic network diagram. Networks aren’t bad, they are just drawn that way. Yet their iconic visual representation and its gross misinterpretation have contributed much to our eroding privacy and political agency under the myth of Big Data and all knowing algorithms. It is time for us to challenge the network and its PROTOCOLS rather than blindly go with the FLOW.

The talk is based on an article commissioned by Tactical Tech for their Exposing The Invisible Guidebook.

The Big Picture

Throughout most of human history, mapping the world was a failure-ridden poetic pursuit—an attempt to visualize that which is just too close to see. Cartographers collected discrete signals and attempted to put them together into “the big picture”. What does the history of picturing the world tell us about the cultural origins of data, its representation and the myth of big data.

AdNauseam – Obfuscation as a Privacy Counter-Measure

As online advertising is becoming more automatic, universal and unsanctioned, AdNauseam works to complete the cycle by automating all ad-clicks universally and blindly on behalf of the target audience. Working in coordination with your ad blocker, AdNauseam quietly clicks every blocked ad, registering a visit on the ad networks databases. As the data gathered shows an omnivorous click-stream, user profiling, targeting and surveillance becomes futile. AdNauseam is a browser extension designed to obfuscate browsing data and protect users from surveillance and tracking by advertising networks. Simultaneously, AdNauseam serves as a means of amplifying users’ discontent with advertising networks that disregard privacy and facilitate bulk surveillance agendas. The talk covers both the background to the project and reviews various practices of data obfuscation.

How Interfaces Demand Obedience

The internet, once associated with openness and decentralization, is increasingly understood in terms of the control exerted by government agencies (like the NSA) and advertising (targeted ads). What is less commonly discussed is how this subliminal control is embedded in interface design. In this talk I argue that web interfaces demand our silent obedience with every page load and I try to offer tactics and strategies for challenging the politics of the interface.

Disinformation Visualization

Designers, statisticians, journalists, researchers and technologists often apply visualization techniques in an attempt to get the big picture out of large quantities of data. In this rush towards informational imagery both creators and viewers are often taken by the lure of what Edward Tufte defines as “beautiful evidence”. But is information visualization indeed just another type of evidence, or is it a form of visual argument? This work was also published as an essay on Visualizing Advocacy.

The Turing Normalizing Machine

(no video documentation available yet)

A project talk based on the Turing Normalizing Experiment in machine learning and algorithmic prejudice (mushon.com/tnm). The talk covers the issues raised by the work, focusing on the life and work of Alan Turing, his otherness, his ideas about artificial intelligence and their materialization into the data-driven-society that we live in today.

Getting Intimate with Invisible Audiences

Invisible audiences drive the success and failures of mediated social life. Before we rush to further network our private and public spaces we should consider this radical cultural shift. Some lessons can be learned from a recent ambiguous website (Chat Roulette) and an old ambiguous book (the Bible).

Wikipedia Illustrated (with Galia Offri)

While we celebrate the explosion of open source software and collaborative projects like Wikipedia, visual art has not enjoyed similar levels of passionate and generous online contribution. Open culture has developed inspiring text-based collaborative models, but has yet to develop successful models for open collaboration on visual culture. Wikipedia Illustrated seeks to develop such models. Through 26 illustrated articles, a blog that follows the production and a set of workshops we hope to develop a methodology for contributing creative-commons licensed illustrations to Wikipedia.

The talk will address the questions at the heart of this project. Is the visual aspect of Wikipedia so lacking and dated because it could only use freely licensed images? Or is it that images have to become “historical” to become removed, objective, factual, and therefore applicable to the Wikipedia guidelines? Is the Wikipedia project really inviting visual artists to contribute their work to the commons? Or is visual work inherently less collaborative? As the project evolves it exposes the myths and biases behind these questions and reveals the surprising and complicated dynamics of open culture.

Audio-Spatial Storytelling

In Hebrew:

The big promise of Augmented Reality is still very far from being fulfilled, but maybe we’ve been looking for it in the wrong place. Actually maybe we shouldn’t be looking for it at all, maybe we should instead listen. In this presentation I propose a different approach to AR through audio-spatial storytelling. The ideas presented are also based on my experience developing the You Are Not Here platform for walking in Gaza through the streets of Tel Aviv.